How Michael Jackson's Thriller changed music videos for ever

The John Landis-directed mini-movie – first shown publicly 30 years ago this week – influenced a generation of directors including Spike Jonze, turned music promos into an industry, and established MTV as a cultural force

John Landis was in London in 1983 when Michael Jackson called to ask if he was interested in making a video for Thriller, the title track of the album he'd released a little under a year before. Seemingly unaware of the time difference, Jackson had called at 2am UK time and the sleepy director had to feign knowledge of the song, which he hadn't heard. Jackson, for his part, hadn't seen Landis's films Animal House, The Blues Brothers or Trading Places; he wanted Landis because of An American Werewolf in London. Landis said he would do the video if it could be a short film, and Jackson embraced the idea. The 13-minute film that resulted changed the music video for ever, becoming less a promo clip than a cultural phenomenon. Even now, Kirsty Wark can perform the Thriller dance on Newsnight as a Halloween joke, and everyone gets it.

Thriller was an event even when it was being shot in October 1983. Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson and Jackie Kennedy Onassis all turned up on set, and Eddie Murphy, Prince and Diana Ross were spotted at the private premiere on 14 November. Thirty years ago this week – on 21 November – it was first shown to the public. To be eligible for the Oscars, it needed a week-long theatrical release, so Landis arranged for it to open, bizarrely, for Disney's Fantasia at a single cinema in LA. And then, at midnight on 2 December, after weeks of trailers and hype, MTV showed it to the world.

Thriller sealed MTV's reputation as a new cultural force; dissolved racial barriers in the station's treatment of music (though MTV has always denied they existed); revolutionised music video production; spawned the "making of" genre of documentary ("The Making of Filler," as Landis said at the time); helped create a market for VHS rentals and sales, because fans were desperate to see it when they wanted, rather than at the will of TV stations; and, in 2009, became the first music video to be inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.

"Music videos in the early 80s started as a little cottage industry in Britain, really," says Brian Grant, the British director who made the Private Dancer video for Tina Turner and Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. "As soon as the Americans got involved, things became monetised, turning music videos into a proper industry, which operated alongside MTV. The big turning point was Thriller."

And yet, it was something of an afterthought: the seventh single from a 10-track album that didn't have the most auspicious of starts when it was released a full year before the Thriller video (long enough for Jackson's nose to look different in the film than it does on the LP cover). "The thrill is gone," suggested the Melody Maker in its review of the album, and it wasn't until videos for Billie Jean and Beat It hit heavy rotation on MTV in early 1983, and Jackson performed the Moonwalk for the first time on the Motown 25 TV special in May, that it really took off. The Thriller video sent album sales into orbit, with Jackson's label Epic reportedly shipping a million copies a week in its immediate aftermath.

Nevertheless, the Thriller video was set to be so expensive – $900,000, to pay for not just the filming and effects but 10 days of dance rehearsals – that Landis and Jackson had to find a way to fund it (Jackson had paid the $150,000 cost of the Beat It video himself). It was Landis's producer George Folsey Jr who came up with the idea of the making-of video, which could be sold to networks as bespoke content. MTV paid $250,000 and Showtime $300,000 for the rights to the documentary, Jackson would take care of upfront costs, and the video was able to go ahead, with the label coughing up $100,000. When the documentary was released on VHS, selling for $29.95, it attracted more than 100,000 advance orders in its own right.

Vaughan Arnell, who had videos on MTV in its earliest days, and has gone on to make 12 promos for Robbie Williams and three for One Direction, remembers Thriller with some trepidation. "In many ways, it wasn't something you really wanted to aspire to," he says. "When you're making music videos, it's like you're a tailor; you cut the suit to fit your model and the artist you're working with. Thriller was the biggest recording artist in the world at the time working with probably the biggest director and it was an amalgamation of the two talents. They made something that was so perfect for the early 80s. It took videos to another level, but in my world and in the world of artists I was dealing with, it's almost like it didn't relate."

Trudy Bellinger was studying art in Brighton when it first shown and it inspired her to start making music films herself. "It was really groundbreaking to have such a long video, and it helped to shape the future of music videos, which previously had been more performance-based," she says. "I recall everybody at college talking about it; about how it was like a mini-movie and how much it had cost. It really opened our eyes to music videos as a creative form of film-making, and a potential career." Six Girls Aloud videos later and Thriller is still part of Bellinger's life. Her 10-year-old son recently learned the routines at a holiday kids' club in Turkey, reminding her of the huge impact it had on kids in the 1980s.

One such kid was Spike Jonze, who was 14 in 1983. "I loved it," he says. "It had some magic that made it shine. When I started directing videos myself a few years later, it was like a touchpoint. I didn't have this thought intellectually at the time, but when I watch it now I realise that there's no reason for a lot of it; it's so free and loose. There's the car running out of gas and it's like a movie, then it just keeps going, as if they're saying: 'That'd be cool, let's do that.' Michael Jackson seems like this kid who loves music, horror films, special effects, makeup, zombies and wants all of those things in the video. It has that spirit to it that must have been contagious; it spoke to other kids."

Jonze took the freedom he sensed in Thriller – and also its eccentricity and humour – and ran with it, creating some of the 90s' most famous music videos, including the Beastie Boys' Sabotage and Praise You by Fatboy Slim, which also get continually spoofed. "When I made videos, whether it was with the Beastie Boys or Björk, we weren't chasing anything," he says. "It was never like some marketing thing. I just wanted to create something that would do justice to the song and I was excited about making, and I think Thriller was the same way."

Perhaps that's Thriller's ultimate legacy, and it's also why Jonze has become a key influence on film-makers creating videos for YouTube. As Psy's Gangnam Style proved, films shot relatively cheaply and quickly, and which don't require pluggers, or for the artist to necessarily have an existing profile, can have a global impact comparable to Thriller. The rules have been rewritten, unleashing a new surge of creativity.

"For nearly three decades, music-related projects had to conform to TV's rules," says Giorgio Testi, who makes artful, elegant films with bands like the Killers and Savages that are not related to a single's release, yet clock up hundreds of thousands of views online. "Then YouTube came along and that suddenly brought film-makers back to a more unconventional way of thinking, which I see as a totally positive thing."

In fact, says Dave Ma – another up-and-coming film-maker who's worked with Foals and Delphic – directors now have no choice but to be as unconventional as Landis 30 years ago, because their work needs to rise above all the junk online: "The emergence of YouTube has given us a plethora of mindless throw-away 'content'. Love it or hate it, labels are obsessed with it and it's here to stay. The flipside of all these interviews, sessions and phone footage is that it takes the heat off music videos, making the traditional performance video completely redundant."

"People are making great videos again," Jonze says. "Romain Gavras – he did M.I.A.'s Bad Girls and that's got to be one of the best videos ever. Ray Tintori, who did MGMT's Kids is really good, too. And Chris Milk – the [interactive] stuff he's doing, like The Wilderness Downtown with Arcade Fire and The Johnny Cash Project could never have been done in the 90s. He's taking things to a whole new place."

Jonze doubts Thriller has had a direct influence on the new school of music video directors, but he is nonetheless convinced it will survive – as a portrait of an artist on the mountaintop. "Above all, it's just this amazing documentation of Michael Jackson at his most electric," he says. "Even him bantering with the girl after they come out of the movie; you're seeing him at this incredible age and at this moment in his life. It's like he's disconnected from everything and everyone, and that's exciting."

Thriller in numbers

$1.8m The amount Texan gold trader Milton Verrett paid for Jackson's red jacket from the video at auction in June 2011

26ins The size of Jackson's waist at the time of filming, according to Landis's wife Deborah, who designed the red jacket

$1m Estimated sum in unpaid royalties for which Landis sued Jackson in 2009

13,597 The number of people who performed the Thriller zombie dance together at an event organised by the Instituto de la Juventud del Gobierno del Distrito Federal at the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City, on in August 2009

156.4m The number of YouTube views of the official posting of the Thriller video

9.5m Total home video and DVD sales of The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller